Delivery

Hanging Out

Delivery

Many tentacled technical device.

This piece harkens back to a fascination of mine with the long forgotten. Here is a stoic object which clearly has some kind of purpose. Its central container, alight with some kind of substance, exits downward into a number of tubes that connect to wall in a very secure manner. There it hangs, suspended and left on it’s own… but why? What purpose does it serve? Where did it come from? Why is it here, now? There is a strange small pattern across its neck… is that something?
My studio/photography space is not suited to attaching things to walls, so all nodes were suspended by wire. These wires have been edited out.

Development

This is one of those sculptures that is as much a reaction to materials as it is an original assembly of my imagination. I knew what I wanted to this to look like, and even what to call it. I drew up a quick sketch, and like a child with new lego instructions began hunting for parts. This piece was made at a time when my art did not fully fund my life, the pieces were gathered idly as I thought of them. After enough elements came together, however, it became necessary to complete the ‘assembly kit’ as it were. Once all that was done, and over the course of another week at most, the object was complete.

Early sketch of the unit.

Artifact

Ever since art discovered me, I was fascinated by the word artifact because ‘art’ is in it. My early college work focused on objects with an ancient history. The kind of history that gets forgotten as time churns ever forward. Like so many ruins that bear no writing, or strange formations that are too perfect (still after so long); or just in an odd enough place that it can’t be nature that put it there. I make sculptures that seem to have had a purpose yet the technology or history of their use is long lost. My very first sculpture like this in college intrigued people enough to constantly ask, “What does it do?” To which I never answered. The technology is not mine, I’ve just been instructed to unearth it or build it. This piece, Delivery, continues that tradition.

A nice formal shot of the neck

Purpose

This kind of sculpture exists in an aesthetic sense, a formal sense, and even a whimsical sense, but all things considered it’s still an object in space. There is enough of a manufactured style in it to indicate purpose, yet the questions of whether it actually serves one, how, and why persist. It’s as much a mode to encourage imaginative speculation as it is an objet d’art. One could decide that it does nothing, shrug and move on. I hope, however, it spawns nuanced entertainment of outrageous possibilities. I want, in a piece such as this, to encourage thought of life without humans in it. As if we’ve moved on and left things behind, yet all record of things still hanging about is lost, deteriorated, or at worst been purged.

After attached to a wall, then where’s it go?

What between the light & the tubes?

Side view of a node.

Science Fiction

Of course, most directly implicated in this piece’s construction is an extension of technologies that don’t exist or don’t yet exist. Like a set piece on a Science Fiction movie or tv show, this piece hangs with a real weight and presence. This makes it real, tangible, and visceral. There are no visible power connections, so how does it illuminate itself? Where does it draw it’s energy? What substance does it contain? Where does the substance it holds get delivered through those many… tentacles? They are like tentacles, aren’t they? Wait, could this thing be… alive? If one would stand there watching it, would it eventually move or twitch? These are questions I leave the viewer with.